This is an updated version of the activity Carly described here in a comment field a few weeks ago in response to her having a lot of extra individually created characters who didn’t get into stories during the course of the year. This assures that they at least got some attention since the artists put so much work into creating these kinds of images.
The value of this activity lies precisely in eating up huge chunks of time at a time of year when that is a desired goal, while not giving up much in terms of quality comprehensible input.
We thank Carly for this one:
1. Pair up 16 images and write something about each pair of images on 8 sheets of chart paper.
For example, if there is an image of a superhero carrot and a basketball-playing strawberry it might look like this “My name is Super Carrot. I live in New York City and I work as a superhero. I can fly faster than a plane but I’m scared of swimming.” Another example: “My name is Sweetie. I play professional basketball and I am captain of the team.”
Add one sentence that both characters might say at the bottom of the text.
This results in 8 of these:
2. Place the 8 chart papers with their corresponding images around the room at stations labeled A through H.
3. Give each student a sheet of blank copy paper which they fold into 8 boxes.
4. Divide the class into 8 groups and send each group to a station.
5. Students first read the write-up with their group.
6. Then, in the corresponding box on their sheet, students complete at least one task of their choice, writing about what they read at each station: (a) they could summarize in English, (b) add on new information inspired by the text, (c) rewrite affirmative statements from the text in the negative, or (d) ask a follow-up question.
7. After about 7 minutes at the station the groups advance to the next station.
9 thoughts on “Super Carrot Activity”
Carly said that with only the 16 students she suggests above it still takes about two days for all the kids to get through all the stations. So a class of 32 students would take four days, and on the Friday of that week you could do a Word Chunk Team Game. And another week of spring bites the dust!
Related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE
Great activity. I will use it next week.
Teacher could write in the TL the problem each character has (from what the students wrote on the back)
Then in one of the boxes to be filled, require students to write a few sentences for a development and resolution stemming either from the secret or the problem.
The teacher can then type up the best and use for readings or story book activities. Thus another week is added to this one. 🙂
That’s a serious higher order critical thinking activity right there, Laura. Excellent idea. Goes in the book as a tag onto the Carrot activity.
Thanks for the idea! I am going to be using this tomorrow.
Every time I read ideas like this on the blog it makes me want to go back into the classroom 🙁
How fun and effective!
I also like the new rubric Carly came up with. As long as we keep it close to the Interpersonal Mode of Communication, we’re good, and we’ve been developing rubrics like this one for over ten years now. Remember jGR? Thanks for both ideas, Carly!
Started this with my 4th / 5th grade students today, and I loved it. I found it to be a nice way to showcase a few of the Individually Created Images that we hadn’t gotten to talk about because there wasn’t enough good detail provided originally by the student. I just picked 3 or 4 of the details to put on the chart paper, and I’m actually hoping that the group will come up with a few fun details that we can add to the bio for the future.
John by the way I am including my description of your work in St. Louis in 2017 in my new book. I’m assuming I have your permission to do that. (I’ve never seen better CI teaching than what you did that day. Superb work.)
Of course you do! I never have a conversation about language teaching without referencing your work, so it’s only fair that you use mine!